by Jim Muttram

Shell knowledge system

Peter Breithaupt from Shell talked about a start-up called Shell Energy Efficiency which builkt in knowledge management from day one. The company offers energy efficieny advice to companies on a shared benefit basis and the problem is there are a thousand engineers scattered around the world and often the expertise in, say, papermills is not where the work is. So the problem was solved by the KM system built on SiteScope – an internet-based collaboration system, Knovel, a small US company offering online reference books, and an internal document management system called LifeLink.

How to get the engineers usine the system? Well, he says, somewhat improbably, make the system fun not administration. More effective is probably the system of rewards in return for making a sensible information request which later is researched, written up and posted on the system, or for making significant numbers of "qualified replies".